Stephen Doty
June 2019
On the Writing Style of Bob Dylan
Creativity has much to do with experience, observation, and imagination and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work…1 [and what counts more is] the attitude towards the experience.2 – Bob Dylan
He’s a lefty. No one knows why some people are, and only ten percent are. It’s known as the artistic hand. Michelangelo and da Vinci were lefty. And it’s a metaphor for the unknown aspect of Dylan’s abilities. The most dominant lyricist since Dylan, Eminem, is also lefty. Both come from the upper-Midwest, and years before he won the Nobel Prize in 2016, Dylan was proud that the first American to win for literature was from his state, Minnesota (Sinclair Lewis).3 Now, it’s the first and last. And another Minnesotan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, should have won, they say. They say that about James Joyce also,4 but Dylan draws the line there. He said Joyce, “seemed like the most arrogant man who ever lived.”5 And why he did is revealing of Dylan’s writing style.
1 Bob Dylan, Chronicles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) 121. Compare a good song to a good joke to see the limits of explanation.
2 Bob Dylan, In His Own Words (New York: Omnibus Press, 1993) 101.
3 Dylan, Chronicles 292. He said Lewis was “the master of absolute realism.” Dylan is a realist too. His win also put the USA up 12-11 over the UK in wins for literature. He broke the tie.
4 “10 Great Writers Snubbed by the Nobel Prize,” The Telegraph 2015.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/10367682/10-great-writers-snubbed-by-the-Nobel-Prize.html?frame=2697475
5 Bob Dylan, Chronicles (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) 130. Dylan wrote of Joyce’s book, “I couldn’t make hide nor hair of it… What he say, I knew not what.”
Ulysses contains the wording of a show-off and an opacity of meaning that struck Dylan as a travesty of higher education.6 Like Orwell and Hemingway, Dylan did not go to college.7 Because he read John Keats and Rimbaud, and recommended them,8 people have inflated their importance to him. T.S. Elliot and Poe were greater influences.9 Literary types are fond of comparing Dylan’s lyrics to the works of Keats, Yeats, or Tennyson, while overlooking the important thing – that any similarities are incidental and not deliberate.10 And the implied suggestion that any such similarities are a passkey to writing like Dylan is misleading. The truth is the opposite.
6 A famous Yale professor of writing would rate Dylan’s writing higher than Joyce’s, given his standard: “The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components.” W. Zinsser, On Writing Well 7th ed. (New York: Harper, 2016) 6 & 7. Dylan did that, as did Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. The good professor also said the tendency to “inflate” diction to “sound important” is a sin that “usually” occurs “in proportion to education and rank.” Id. That is confirmed by academic journals and government publications. The Center for Plain Language keeps an eye on what federal agencies write and dropped their grade from a B to a C recently. WSJ 10/27/18: A12. We need less Joyce and more Dylan in government.
7 Dylan said the problem with “education” is it doesn’t train people to “think.” Instead, “You get told… what you are supposed to think about” a subject. For example, today students are told to think A about climate change, B about slavery in America, but C about slavery in Africa, and D about capitalism. Is that teaching critical thinking or partisan, political indoctrination? See “Bob Dylan, Martha Quinn Interview (1984) pt. 3,” on YouTube.com.
8 Dylan once said, “read John Keats.” Dylan, In His Own Words 110. Regarding Rimbaud, see Dylan, Chronicles 288. Unlike Dylan, Rimbaud stressed poetic form. He assigned colors to vowels – A is black, I is red, and so on. C.A. Hackett, Rimbaud: A Critical Introduction (New York: Cambridge, 1981) 136 & 129. The reader doesn’t care about his arbitrary color scheme, though. It was a pretentious stipulation. As a poet, Rimbaud fancied himself a prophet; whereas, Dylan was called a prophet, but denied it. They were opposites in significant ways. Id. 129 & Dylan, Chronicles 116.
9 Dylan, Chronicles 110. He memorized a poem by Poe, set it to guitar, and sang it. He once stood outside Poe’s old house. Id. 37 & 103. His lyrics were closer to T.S. Elliot’s “Prufrock” in their feel than to Yeats, Tennyson, Keats, or Rimbaud.
10 Book review of C. Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco Press, 2004): “A favorite technique is to present a Yeats or Tennyson poem for comparison with a Dylan lyric.” The innuendo seems to be that one can read these poets and then maybe write like Dylan. Really? Let’s see the author do it then.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3Q7CT654CBN4O/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0009SRZBA. Another reviewer, Cate Luna, in “Wanted to like it but mostly bored,” found the book poorly written, arbitrarily divided into sins, focused on the wrong songs, and those who praised it “either never read this mediocre manuscript or, like me, wanted to like it, but unlike me, skimmed through it and found enough to like to put their stamp of approval on it. Friends doing favors? That’s how things go when you’re trying to sell books.” https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RNZJ0KFJNWCHR/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0060599243. The book’s back cover has a review that makes one not want to read it either, because of its misguided focus on words, not on meanings: “Dylan’s art is in dialogue with the English language [a nonsensical use of ‘dialogue’ there, the critic’s vice] at its heights, that it is about language.” No, it isn’t. Words are the vehicles of meaning and are only elevated above meaning by literary types who over-study form like pedants. It’s the only thing they know enough to write about, so they shoehorn everything into it, so they can babble their ill-focused analysis and hope to look erudite to people who don’t know any better.
The breakthrough for Dylan came when he heard the song “Pirate Jenny,” which deviated from established poetic forms and relied on message and “attitude.”11 Dylan was awarded the Nobel not for toeing the line, but for creating “new poetic expressions.”12 To file such novelty down to the level of similarity to anyone else is as wrong-headed as it is unfair. One can’t logically get from the works of other poets to his songs. Among artists, we tend to over-pursue similarities, which distracts from what is more important – differences. When Dylan was told Robert Johnson may have read Walt Whitman, he said: “Maybe he did, but it doesn’t clear up anything.”13 Yes, it’s a distraction.
As chess meant more to Bobby Fischer than to others,14 folk music meant more to Dylan than to others. “I had no other cares or interests,” he said, “Folk music was all I needed… I played morning, noon, and night. That’s all I did.”15 He especially liked the songs of Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Jack Elliot, Dave van Ronk, Johnny Cash, and Robert Johnson.
His favorite prose writer was Thucydides,16 who was vivid and concise, like Hemingway, whose style was described as an iceberg. What could be implied was left unstated.17 Hemingway said he got the idea from Ezra Pound,18 who is known for imagism,19 the notion of the writer as a painter, a metaphor Hemingway adopted, despite its limits.20 But Dylan read no Pound.21 Nevertheless, the folk songs he liked
11Dylan, Chronicles 274.
12 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/prize-announcement/
13 Dylan, Chronicles 286.
14 “All I want to do, ever, is just play chess.” http://bobbyfischer.net/fischerquotes.html
15 Dylan, Chronicles 236 & 241.
16 Dylan, Chronicles 36-7.
17 Dorothy Parker described Hemingway’s (iceberg) style: “[Sinclair] Lewis remains a reporter and Hemingway stands a genius because Hemingway has an unerring sense of selection. He discards details with a magnificent lavishness; he keeps his words to their short path. His is, as any reader knows, a dangerous influence. The simple thing he does looks so easy to do. But look at the boys who try to do it.” Dorothy Parker, The Portable Dorothy Parker (New York: Viking, 1973, orig. 1927) 461.
18 “Hemingway learned a great deal about how to achieve a compressed and precise Imagist style from Pound… He said Pound taught him more about ‘how to write and how not to write’ than any son of a bitch alive.” Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway, A Biography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999) 74.
19 Imagism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism.
20 In the first page of “Indian Camp,” Hemingway shows the writer is far more than a painter by describing sounds, temperatures, feelings – the non-visual. Yet, the metaphor is easy, and Dylan said of his album Blood on the Tracks, “I was just trying to make it like a painting.” Dylan, Chronicles 49.
were still imagist and in the iceberg style, especially those of Robert Johnson, whose cryptic, symbolic phrasing was a catalyst for Dylan’s work.22
Writers seem to fall along a spectrum. On one end are those who prefer the relations of abstract nouns, thesaurus in hand, reminiscent of the tender-minded school of philosophy William James observed.23 They may be called the word-first types and include the reverie poets like Keats, who put Beauty (often capitalized in his time) ahead of truth and experience.24 Lord Byron called Keats “second-hand.”25 On the other end are those who embrace ugly truths and concrete reality. They look first and try to label things without cliché. Their goal is truth, and they are akin to the tough-minded school. They may be called the fact-first types and include George Orwell, Somerset Maugham, and Dylan, who once sang about a poem: And every one of those words rang true and glowed like burning coals, pouring off of every page like it was written in my soul, from me to you.26 He mentioned the poem’s truth, not its beauty. The fact-first method is manifest in Dylan’s prose also – he doesn’t say a lady held a glass of red wine, but looks closer and goes with crimson purple27.
Dylan said a folk singer’s truth is “more true to life than life itself.”28 And if one’s life is one part hope, two parts misunderstanding, and three parts fairy tale, then he’s right. A good lyricist, therefore, may be viewed as part scientist and part philosopher. He may reveal hidden truths, as Newton did when he explained high tide with the
21 Dylan, Chronicles 110.
22 Dylan, Chronicles 284-5.
23 William James, Pragmatism (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1991, orig. 1907) 8 & 9.
24 Keats’s Poetry and Prose ed. J.N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009) 581. Keats wrote that among good poets, “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration.”
25 Keats’s Poetry and Prose 555. And M. Levinson wrote, “a substitute for a grim life became for Keats a substitute life.” P. 551. Keats wanted to join the leisure class, but never made decent money. Whereas, Dylan was working-class and happy with it. He read Kerouac and liked Guthrie’s pro-union songs. Dylan had an authentic voice for the disgruntled farm-hand in “Maggie’s Farm,” one of his best, especially the live version at Newport in 1965, with the amazing Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar.
26 “Tangled up in Blue,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1974. https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/tangled-blue/.
27 Dylan, Chronicles 210. Another example is on P. 206: “New Orleans was beginning to pull on me and I was feeling the weight of the line.” Whereas, another sort of writer would simply say it was time to go.
28 Dylan, Chronicles 71 & 236. An immediate valid inference from Dylan’s notion of the truth is that the progressive campus philosophy of “my truth” is bogus, since any self-deception could be called that. It removes the incentive for finding the truth, since you assume you have it when you may not. Given the warrant that people believe what they want to believe, we have grounds to suspect they merely believe their truth is true because they want to. Their desires impose no duty on others to believe it’s true.
moon’s gravity, and he may put things in perspective, as Nietzsche did when he said to live your life as if you would have to relive it. Whereas, Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”29 which is a false equivalence that creates conceptual confusion.
Your favorite Dylan song may be unknown to another Dylan fan, and vice versa. That’s how it goes with music – just as you may never hear your favorite Elton John song on the radio. And it raises the issue of what makes a favorite song. A clue is found in that of the guitarist Jack White. He was obsessed with music as a kid, had no room for a bed because of two drum kits, and was doubtless shamed for it as the black sheep of his large family. One day, he heard an ex-preacher sing, You know your mother will talk about you, your sisters and your brothers too… just as soon as your back is turned, they’ll be tryin’ to crush you down.30 It made him realize their jabs were not his fault, but typical family rivalry, and it need not sour him to people in general; the song went on, But bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find. Don’t you mind people grinnin’ in your face. The song has no music, but has the advice and perspective he finds therapeutic.
Let’s look at a few Dylan lyrics now:
1. Ahh, you never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns when they all did tricks for you. Never understood that it ain’t no good – you shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you.31 The spoiled, rich girl he is addressing seems like a stand-in for the entire haughty rich. Dylan used her to show them their status was no more secure than hers, and how their priorities were wrong. Once he got their attention, he confronted them with, How does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone? And he could ask. He left home as a teen with just a guitar, went to St. Paul, learned songs by heart for free at a local record store, and
29Keats’s Poetry and Prose 462. From “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”
30 Erroneous lyrics appear online when you Google the song, “Grinnin’ in your Face” by Son House. The words quoted above occur in the song itself, though: https://youtu.be/QA8-ZOuKetU
31 “Like a Rolling Stone,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1965. Dylan’s official website has mistaken lyrics to this song. It lists words he never sang, maybe from a draft intended to be sung, but which sounded too wordy once tried in the studio: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/rolling-stone/ The best lyric source is the song itself. https://youtu.be/IwOfCgkyEj0 The lyrics quoted above are true to the song as sung on the record.
then went down to a coffee joint and played them for enough money to live on.32 Later, he hitch-hiked to New York.33
2. Mama, put my guns in the ground. I can’t shoot them anymore. That long, black cloud is comin’ down. I feel I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door.34 If he sang “on” the ground, the effect would suffer, because of what the imagist calls an objective correlative would change.35 Pistol barrels stuffed in the dirt exhibit the intent to renounce violence. And in the face of death, that change of heart rings true.
3. And it ain’t no use in a turnin’ on your light, babe – the light I never knowed. And it ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe. I’m on the dark side of the road.36 If he never knew her light before, it shows a reason for their break-up – that he loved her more. And now that love is lost, he’d rather stay out of view, and the image of him walking on the dark side of the road beyond the reach of her porch light captures the feeling well. It’s likely about his first real love, Suze, who was 17 when they first met37 – thus, How I once loved a woman, a child I am told. It’s a classic break-up song, the type Keats would not have written.38
32 Dylan, Chronicles 237.
33 Dylan, Chronicles 257.
34 “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1973. https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/knockin-heavens-door/
35 On imagism & objective correlatives: http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n2297/pdf/ch09.pdf
36 “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1963. Mistaken lyrics for this song are posted on his website: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/dont-think-twice-its-all-right/ The best source is the song itself, which I quoted above, from iTunes.
37 Dylan, Chronicles 272-3.
38 Keats’s Poetry and Prose ed. J.N. Cox (New York: Norton, 2009) 60 & 543; Paul de Man said that making sense of events was not Keats’s bag: “Memory, being founded on actual sensations, is for Keats the enemy of poetic language, which thrives instead on dreams of pure potentiality. “ Id. His signature style was happy-talk about the future: “Why so sad a moan? / Life is the rose’s hope while yet unblown,” or “Stop and consider! Life is but a day.” “Sleep & Poetry” Id. 60. No, it’s not, John. Ask anyone in their 60s. A book reviewer of Dylan’s Visions of Sin on Amazon.com stressed the book’s noting a similarity in rhyme scheme between a Dylan song and “Ode to a Nightingale,” as if it was very significant. It’s all innuendo. He is barking up the wrong pine tree, since any alleged similarity was incidental, absent solid evidence to the contrary, and less important than Dylan’s different content.
4. And now I know you’re dissatisfied with your position and your place. Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem?39 Old acquaintances might resent your success, suspect it’s ill-gotten, mess up their own lives, then act like you owe them. These words give voice to such feelings. His first apartment was on 4th St., a block from the Blue Note, where musicians gossiped, at a time when Dylan got signed to Columbia Records. Wall St. bankers could also find comfort in that line when students protested them. The students’ real target was their college for their student-loan debt and lack of job skills. The song continued, Do you take me for such a fool to think I’d make contact with one who tries to hide what it don’t know to begin with? Ever have to deal with a two-face group who believes some gossip about you, but acts like you owe them your company anyway? It’s a verbal grip on that feeling.
5. Some are mathematicians, some are carpenters’ wives. Don’t know how it all got started. I don’t know what they do with their lives.40 Ever look back on all the people you once knew and marvel at how their paths have diverged in odd ways? This puts a succinct grip on that idea, and his tone of voice really sells it.
Dylan could sing a folk song “convincingly,” and not everyone could do that, he said (karaoke, anyone?).41 Joan Baez could too, and he called her “the Queen of the folk
39 “Positively 4th St,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1965. His website has mistaken lyrics: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/positively-4th-street/. He doesn’t sing “what he don’t know to begin with,” but keeps gender neutral and refers to the antecedent “crowd” with “it.” His first apartment was on 4th St. New York City, a block from the Blue Note. Dylan got a job as a regular at the Gaslight and was signed to Columbia Records at age 20. His music peers in that area, who were less successful, likely felt envious, which led to gossip combined with a show of fawning to his face, in the hope of getting something, or as he sang, “to be on the side that’s winning.” Notice the song breaks normal folk song structure by having no chorus also.
40 “Tangled up in Blue,” a song by Bob Dylan. 1974. His website has mistaken lyrics: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/tangled-blue/ But the words quoted above were the ones sung on the record.
41 Dylan, Chronicles 256. “The singer has to make you believe what you are hearing and Joan could do that.” And, “I could do the songs she did… not everyone can sing these songs convincingly.”
singers.”42 No one knows the formula for singing convincingly, but can recognize it when they hear it. It’s another essential quality he has, because, as Elton John’s producer put it, “There’s no such thing as a hit lyric.”43 It must be delivered. If lyrics were enough, some poet would have kept the song “Hello Goodbye” off the top of the charts.
Dylan’s auditory proclivity was evident early on. His distinct, early memories were of sounds – foghorns and trains.44 Songs on the radio then grabbed his attention, but his auditory orientation was already there. He was short, thin, and asthmatic and spent a lot of time in his room in Duluth. Music let him transcend his physical weakness: “I always thought that one man with a guitar could blow an entire army off the stage if he knew what he was doing.”45
Dylan used simple rhymes, ABAB (ground, more, down, door; “Heaven’s Door”) and more complex ones, ABCAB / CDDDD EFG/ …EFG (steeple, all, people / all, drinkin’, thinkin’, got it made / pawn it babe “Rolling Stone”). But there’s no such thing as a hit rhyme scheme. No form is more thought out than a sonnet’s and look how many bad ones have been written since Shakespeare. For Dylan, content was king – more important than melodies.46 But it takes the combined effect of the content, rhyme scheme, vocals, and melody to transport your mind to another place. The feeling the song gives you is a unified data point, difficult to reduce to anything smaller without distortion.47
42 Dylan, Chronicles 254. Dylan said Jack Elliot was ‘the King of the Folksingers,” but actually spoke more highly of Johnny Cash’s voice elsewhere. P. 216.
43 Gus Dudgeon produced Elton John’s classic No. 1 albums in the 1970s, such as Caribou; it has great songs that are not heard on the radio, such as “I’ve Seen the Saucers” and “You’re so Static” and “Pinky” and “Stinker.” https://youtu.be/14An7s2EeWQ
44 Dylan, Chronicles 273.
45 Dylan, In His Own Words 35.
46 Dylan, In His Own Words 29. He said, “I don’t give a damn about the melodies.” But he was also proud that they were recorded as instrumentals by others. He said the best cover artist for his songs, with vocals, was Johnny Rivers.
47 A old master exhorts a person, “never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind.” Thomas de Quincey, “On the Knocking at the gate…” The Norton Anthology of English Literature 8th ed. Vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 2006, orig. 1823) 569. He argues that our understanding is often wrong – as when it leads us to draw the parallel lines of a street as non-converging, yet they look converging in real life. The knock at the gate in Macbeth gave De Quincey an eerie feeling he could not explain, till he realized it bookended the horror of murder against the sounds of normal life and put the focus off the deceased king and onto Macbeth’s mind. Id. 570-2. We must guard against explaining a feeling wrong due to the poor power of our understanding, which has a separate mental function. As the French say, the heart has its reasons which the mind knows not.
By the late ‘80s, Dylan admits he lost his groove. He had to reinvent his breathing so he could sing better, with the economy of air Billy Eckstine used, and his new lyrics were too general, such as “Political World,” “Dignity” and “Most of the Time,”48 as if he forgot his old method of starting “small” and “narrow.”49 One song he considered good, “The Man in the Long Black Coat,”50 seemed contrived and the title was not fresh, but similar to a published children’s book. It’s a tale of lost love that pales next to his old classic “Don’t Think Twice.” Setting a high benchmark early in your career has a downside. It creates marks too high to hit again, and everyone notices the shortfall.
Ever find yourself singing a lyric and not know why? You may notice later it fits what you were doing or feeling. Dylan said his lyrics “had struck nerves that had never been struck before.”51 He found the words for some shared feelings. He said, “I am a mystery only to those who haven’t felt the same things I have.”52 By that reasoning, feeling what his songs express is sufficient for understanding him. Another quality he has that’s overlooked is that he’s just smart.
So what led to his big break – lyrics, vocals, guitar? Neither. It was his decision to learn the harmonica, and his ability to play it. A female recording artist invited him to play it in the studio. Afterwards, Columbia Records signed him when he was only 20. By a twist of fate, the president of the record company had read a newspaper review earlier that day praising Dylan’s performance at a local club.53
Since no prize for literature was given last year, two will be given this year. And each winner will receive over a million dollars.54 If they stick with lyricists, who should feel anxious? Maybe, Hal David, Paul McCartney, Bernie Taupin, and Bruce Springsteen.
48 Dylan, Chronicles 185-6. “Most of the Time” was a tedious chore that went nowhere. It had “cloudy meaning.”
49 Dylan, In His Own Words 32. From the concrete, a broader message can come, just as every universal, in philosophy, is found in a particular from which it is abstracted. If you start too broad or general, e.g., “We live in a political world,” then it’s prosaic, unlike Robert Johnson’s terse verbal code he so admired. Chronicles 166 & 191. Johnson’s lines about having dead shrimp and somebody fishing in his hole in “Dead Shrimp Blues” was also a metaphor for their relationship; thus, the “dual existence” of the phrases that Dylan respected; it made a song transcendent, he said. Chronicles 284 & 276.
50 Chronicles 216. He called it “the real facts.”
51 Dylan, Chronicles 119.
52 Dylan, In His Own Words 101. He also wrote, “The stuff I write comes from an autobiographical place.” But it doesn’t “define me as a person.” Dylan, Chronicles 199.
53 Dylan, Chronicles 278-9.
54 Brenda Cronin, “New Literary Prize” Wall Street Journal 2 Oct 2018: A13.
© 2019 Stephen Doty